In aftermath of Giffords shooting, news orgs look for ways to correct tweets

by Mallary Jean Tenore

One of the lessons that journalism pioneer John Quinn taught me a while back has stuck with me throughout the years: “Get it first,” he used to say, “but first get it right.” I was reminded of his words while watching conflicting media reports unfold shortly after the Gabrielle Giffords shooting. (See my related Poynter.org story here.)

NPR first reported that Giffords had died, and soon after CNN, Fox News and The New York Times did the same. But they then retracted the information, saying she wasn’t in fact dead. NPR, which heard the information from two sources — the local sheriff’s office and a congressman’s office — apologized for the mistake and called it an unintentional error of judgment.

The errors played out on Twitter, too. Andy Carvin, who is responsible for NPR’s tweets, said that instead of deleting the tweet he wrote about Giffords being dead, he posted another tweet saying, “Update: there are conflicting reports about whether she was killed.” Carvin didn’t retract the original tweet, he said, because he wanted to be transparent about NPR’s mistake. His handling of the situation made me think about how news organizations should best handle corrections on Twitter.

In an e-mail interview, Kathryn Schulz, author of “Being Wrong,” shared an interesting insight with me along these lines. “Why not have a ‘correct’ function (like the ‘reply’ and ‘retweet’ functions) that would automatically send a correction to everyone who had retweeted something that contained an error?” she asked. “That’s not beyond the limits of technology.”